Ever feel like you’re failing at your own recovery? Like there’s some invisible timer ticking down, and you’re just… not there yet?
I’ve spent a lot of time in that headspace. The one where you’re checking your progress against some imaginary standard of ‘healed.’ You know, the kind of progress that looks like a straight line going up, where one day you just wake up and the pain is gone.
But the truth is, that straight line is a lie. It’s a product of a culture that’s obsessed with ‘fixing’ things as quickly as possible.
“Trauma doesn’t operate on a nice, linear timeline… your body and nervous system hold on to it.”
Embracing Your Journey – Hope For The Journey
That hit me hard. I used to think I was just ‘bad’ at healing. Like I wasn’t trying hard enough, or I wasn’t using the right tools. But the truth is, the body doesn’t care about your calendar. It processes things in its own time, and often, it takes the long way around.
When we force ourselves to ‘get over it,’ we aren’t actually healing. We’re just performing. We’re putting on the mask because it’s more comfortable for the people around us.
https://x.com/healinggjourney
And that performance is exhausting. It’s a second war we fight on top of the original wound. We spend more energy trying to *look* okay than we do actually *being* okay.
“Real healing behaves more like geological change. Slow. Invisible at first. Accumulative.”
Healing Without Toxic Positivity – Residual Worlds
I love that framing. Geological change. You don’t see the mountain move in real-time, but over a million years, everything is different. Our healing is the same. It’s not a ‘breakthrough.’ It’s just… shifting. Very, very slowly.
If you’ve been feeling that crushing weight of needing to be ‘fixed’ or ‘over it’ already, you might find some peace in the pressure to ‘get over it’.
So, if you’re still hurting today? That’s okay. You aren’t broken, and you aren’t failing. You’re just in the middle of a very slow, very real shift. Give yourself some room to breathe.